Skid-Steer from Original Line Surfaces

A call to the Mustang parts department led to a new project and sense of pride for Mustang employees.

An equipment dealer called looking for a belt for a skid-steer loader Mustang previously manufactured. The call was especially intriguing to the employees at the Owatonna, Minn.-based company because the belt the caller was seeking was for the Mustang Model 1000 – one of the company’s original 25 machines, sold in1965.

As word spread, many employees offered to pitch in to buy the piece of their company’s history and refurbish it to look how it did 40 years ago, but General Manager Randy Vargason decided to buy the machine on the company’s dime.

He was hesitant at first.

“I was one of the last to get on the bandwagon,” he says, adding the company recently bought and restored another Model 1000 and thought one was enough. But the idea grew on him as he realized what it meant to the employees.

“A lot of the people on staff have a lot of years with the company, and they have a lot of pride.”

The 40-year-old machine only has 339.6 hours clocked on its original, working meter. Not bad, considering the average life of a skid-steer is 4,000 to 5,000 hours, according to Lyle Snider, who has been with the company 38 years and works in customer support.

He figures the skid-steer’s most recent owner – Joe Gross of J. Gross Equipment in Aberdeen, S.D. – was the machine’s third owner.

Steve Louks, a product specialist who works on repairs of older machines, says it’s rare to see even the newer machines in a condition similar to this Model 1000.

“Someone had to be taking care of it,” he says.

It took employees less than a month to restore the skid-steer. That involved sandblasting and repainting it and having a couple of the original parts remade and replaced.

The original Model 1000s were only built for five years. When Snider started, the company – then known as Owatonna Manufacturing Co. – was building a redesigned version of the Model 1000. And they weren’t called skid-steers back then. The Mustang machines were advertised as “self-propelled four-wheel drive units”

Usually, finding replacement parts for equipment this old is tough.

“It is unusual to find parts for compact equipment older than 15 years.” Snider says, adding that Mustang keeps prints of older equipment and tries to help customers find the part they’re hunting for whenever they can.

“We may take having a satisfied customer too far,” he says. “We try to do things the old-fashioned way.”

The machine is sitting in the town’s historical society. The company hopes to take it on the road soon to appear at longtime Mustang dealers and regional and national trade shows.

Now that the company owns one of its original 25 skid-steers, will the employees be satisfied?

“If we found No. 1, I’m sure we’d be pretty temped,” Snider says.